Madam, - I refer to Dr Edward Walsh's article on nuclear energy in your edition of April 26th. While the death toll resulting from the Chernobyl disaster is officially regarded as 9,000, the number of accelerated deaths among the 5 million people in the fallout zone cannot be calculated. To write these off totally is a convenient manipulation of the facts.
I note that Dr Walsh attributes the deaths caused by the disaster to faulty Russian engineering and insufficient safety standards. With regard to his comparative statistics for coal mining, I doubt that Chinese mines are maintained to current international standards. Also, on the basis that there are a large number of hydroelectric dams still standing (many of them bigger than the collapsed dams in Italy and India), it is reasonable to say that such failures were also attributable to engineering failures and that they would not happen under modern standards.
Dr Walsh does not mention the 1957, 1983 or 2005 nuclear accidents in Sellafield, nor that there have been significant civilian nuclear accidents in Germany, Russia, Japan, the US and the UK (apart from Sellafield) since the Chernobyl disaster.
Due to the discharge of low-level nuclear waste as well as plutonium from Sellafield, the Irish Sea is the most radioactive sea in the world. There is much debate as to the health effects of this on residents of the east coast. It has been easy to disregard cancer cases along the coast as naturally occurring, but to do this without significant study is very foolish. The effects of any new nuclear installations would take up to two decades to assess, by which time it would be too late.
Dr Walsh completely disregards the most prominent danger of nuclear power - the waste generated, which will remain radioactive for over 20,000 years.
And even if we can dispose of the waste safely, the nuclear site will still require care (in the best case) for hundreds of years. The repair project for Chernobyl Reactor Four has an estimated cost of almost $1 billion - and will likely have to be rebuilt many hundreds of times before the site is safe again.- Yours, etc,
CIAN DAVIS, B Eng, MIEI, Postgraduate Researcher, University of Limerick.